State Sen. Mark Leno is calling a joint hearing into the matter before the Public Safety Committee, which he chairs, and the Utilities Committee. "The current leadership at PG&E has lost its way. Nobody is minding the ship,” Leno told the Guardian. He said that he's furious about the explosion and PG&E's shoddy safety record."Enough with the self-initiated, self-serving, self-funded political campaigns," he told us. "Enough with the illegal attempts to interfere with community choice aggregation in Marin. Enough with the mad rush to smart meters. How about focusing on the current mission -- to provide gas and electricity safely reliably and affordably, without death and destruction?"

Ironically, it's possible that PG&E's efforts to prevent a greater public role into how energy is provided to Californians could end up resulting in far more public oversight over a utility that has put more energy into regular political campaigns – from this year's statewide campaign to similarly over-the-top spending to kill public power proposals recently in San Francisco, Yolo, and Sacramento counties – than the energy business. Leno told us the model of the private regulated utility no longer works. "This hybrid creation of sort of public, kind of private, state regulated but not really is a creation that no longer functions."

She closes the piece with an apt question, one that Leno's committee will hopefully answer: “The San Bruno tragedy is a clarion call to rebuild America and insist on ratepayer say on utility pay. I think most taxpayers would reject deadly priorities that put politics over pipelines and choose repairs to the ground literally crumbling beneath our feet, and most ratepayers would choose crumbling infrastructure repairs over political campaigns. Wouldn't you?”